The influences of ecology are subtle. So far, few have realised that biodiversity, as noted in South Korea, is key to climate change in many situations. Maintaining our ecosystems should be key in these changing times, but our climate changes continue because we have not resolved the pollution or the degradation issues that we have caused. New ideas and new solutions are essential to combating our climate problems, as Norway (and many others) state categorically.

Tribal rights advocates and rainforest defenders are using community mapmaking to protect ancestral land
Indigenous communities in Indonesia are using GPS technology to demarcate the boundaries of their ancestral lands, a move many believe could also help mitigate the negative effects of climate change.
"Community mapmaking has been a successful tool to show the government that we are here, and that we want to protect our lands," says Rukka Sombolinggi, a spokeswoman for the Indigenous Peoples' Alliance of the Archipelago (Aman), a Jakarta-based secretariat representing more than 2,000 communities.
Indonesia's dense forests are home to an estimated 50 million-70 million indigenous people, and 10% of all known plant species, according to Aman and the Rainforest Action Network , a non-profit international environmental advocacy group based in San Francisco.
"Indonesia's forests are recognised as important, not only at local and national levels but also at the global level, as they ...

Environmentalists warn approval could shatter global agreement not to use technology, with devastating repercussions
Brazil is set to break a global moratorium on genetically-modified "terminator" seeds, which are said to threaten the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world.
The sterile or "suicide" seeds are produced by means of genetic use restriction technology, which makes crops die off after one harvest without producing offspring. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds for each planting, which reduces their self-sufficiency and makes them dependent on major seed and chemical companies.
Environmentalists fear that any such move by Brazil – one of the biggest agricultural producers on the planet – could produce a domino effect that would result in the worldwide adoption of the controversial technology.
Major seed and chemical companies, which together own more than 60% of the global seed market, all have patents on terminator seed technologies. However, in the ...

Blue Ventures has increased access to contraception from 10% in 2007 to 55% today. What can the global health community learn?
The national contraception use rate in Madagascar is 29%. Yet in Velondriake, a remote area in the southwest of the country, it is 55%. Just 10% of the community had access in 2007 when the marine conservation organisation Blue Ventures launched Safidy , its family planning programme. So how did it do it?
Safidy, which means "choice" in Malagasy, was born out of a desire to help the communities Blue Ventures was working with. The area had virtually no health infrastructure and a focus group revealed a huge need for family planning. Agathe Lawson, the United Nations Population Fund representative in Madagascar, who supports Blue Ventures and a number of other family planning initiatives in the country, says that asking the community for what it wanted was instrumental to Safidy's success. "Sometimes we can pre-empt what people want but qualitative research is ...

Pharmaceutical firms would need to compensate indigenous people for using their knowhow in creating new medicines
The European parliament is debating a draft biopiracy law requiring industry to compensate indigenous people if it makes commercial use of local knowledge such as plant-based medicines.
Under the law – based on the international convention on access to biodiversity, the Nagoya protocol – the pharmaceuticals industry would need the written consent of local or indigenous people before exploring their region's genetic resources or making use of their traditional knowhow.
Relevant authorities would have the power to sanction companies that fail to comply, protecting local interests from the predatory attitude of big European companies.
German firm patents South African herb
The draft report on access to genetic resources by Green MEP Sandrine Bélier cites as an example a German pharmaceutical company's dealings in South Africa.
Pelargonium sidoides, a variety of ...

Russ George says he has been under a 'dark cloud of vilification' following his ocean fertilisation test off Canada's Pacific coast
The American businessman who dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean has become a lone defender of his project, after a storm of criticism from indigenous peoples, the Canadian government and a UN biodiversity meeting in India.
Russ George, who told the Globe and Mail that he is the world's leading "champion" of geoengineering, says he has been under a "dark cloud of vilification" since the Guardian broke news of an ocean fertilisation scheme, funded by an indigenous village on the Haida Gwaii islands, that aimed to make money in offset markets by sequestering carbon through artificial plankton blooms.
"I'm not a rich, scheming businessman, right," he said . "That's not who I am … This is my heart's work, not my hip pocket work, right?"
A US agency that loaned George's company 20 expensive ocean gliders said they had been ...